The Italian Navigator of New World Fascism

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

You’re the top!
You’re the Great Houdini!
You’re the top!
You are Mussolini!

1934 lyrics to “You’re the Top,” by Cole Porter

When most Americans think of the Italian strong-man Benito Mussolini, black and white images spring to mind of the uniformed dictator strutting on his balcony before the cheering Italian masses, or hanging dead by his heals before the cheering Italian masses.

Like the Italian people who once idolized him before killing him, the international elite were enamored by the planned economy of Mussolini’s “Corporate State Model” before disowning Hitler’s Axis ally and conveniently forgetting their depression-era admiration for the wide-jawed Italian.

In the early 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt confided to a member of the White House press corps, “I don’t mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman.”

In a 1933 letter written to U.S. Ambassador to Italy, Breckinridge Long, Roosevelt commented:

I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he [Mussolini] has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble.

As uncomfortable as it is for many of today’s slavishly devoted Democrats and their media mouthpieces to admit, Roosevelt’s New Deal government programs, most of which continue to haunt us today, were modeled on programs implemented by Mussolini in Italy.

George Soule, editor of the pro-Roosevelt New Republic Magazine, said in his 1934 book “The Coming American Revolution:”

We are trying out the economics of Fascism without having suffered all its social
or political ravages.

J.B. Mathews and R.E. Shallcross in a Harper’s Magazine article entitled “Must America Go Fascist?” wrote:

It is in the very nature of planned recovery, its methods and its objective, that we find the tendency, which, if developed to its logical conclusion, arrives at the Fascist stage of economic control. Mild measures have failed and by their failure have prepared the way for accentuating the tendency toward Fascist control.

As is the case with today’s severe economic downturn, America’s opinion-shapers proclaimed the Great Depression the “end of Capitalism.” Many sought a system of government guidance to direct business and labor in a less draconian manner than did Stalin’s Communist police state. Many in the world, therefore, looked to Mussolini’s Fascist police state as an alternative political system for bringing about a new society. After all, Mussolini couched his jackboot approach to social organization in terms many Democrats and some Republicans do to this day. In a speech given in Milan on October 6, 1934, Mussolini said:

The economic objective of the Fascist regime is greater social justice for the Italian people. What do I mean by social justice? I mean the guarantee of work, a fair wage, a decorous home; I mean the possibility of evolution and betterment. If modern science has solved the problem of multiplying wealth, science, spurred on by the state, must now solve the other problem, that of the distribution of wealth, so that the illogical, paradoxical, and cruel phenomenon of want in the midst of plenty shall not be repeated.

FDR’s Secretary of Labor, Francis Perkins, recalled that, "At the first meeting of the Cabinet... in 1933, [FDR’s] financier and adviser, Bernard Baruch, and Baruch’s friend Gen. Hugh Johnson... came in with a copy of a book by [Giovanni] Gentile, the Italian Fascist theoretician [Mussolini’s Education Minister], for each member of Cabinet, we all read it with great care.”

Retired General Hugh Samuel Johnson was tapped by Roosevelt to head one of the New Deal’s “alphabet” agencies, The National Recovery Administration (NRA). Its most striking feature was its insignia – a blue Fascist eagle.

In a radio address to the nation after the creation of the NRA, FDR said:

In war in the gloom of night attack, soldiers wear a bright badge to be sure that comrades do not fire on comrades. Those who cooperate in this program must know each other at a glance. That bright badge is the Blue Eagle.

Implicit in Roosevelt’s martial words was a warning that anyone not a member of the NRA was by definition the enemy.

Gen. Hugh Johnson, the new agency’s brash administrator hammered home this point, “May Almighty God have mercy on anyone who attempts to trifle with that bird.”

In time, Johnson summoned the leaders of industry to the nation’s capital. The Journalist John T. Flynn observed, “He [Johnson] began with a blanket code which every business man was summoned to sign – to pay minimum wages and observe the maximum hours of work…abjure price increases and put people to work. Every instrument of human exhortation opened fire on business to comply – the press, pulpit, radio, movies. Bands played, men paraded, trucks toured the streets blaring the message through megaphones. Johnson hatched out an amazing bird called the Blue Eagle. Every business concern that signed up got a Blue Eagle, which was the badge of compliance.”

And Johnson knew how to deal with those who did not comply. Under the NRA, over 700 industry codes controlled worker’s hours, wages and fixed the price of products and services. In New York’s garment district, for instants, squads of NRA “code enforcers” patrolled at night in search of violators. Under the NRA regime, night work was prohibited. Enforcers could enter a factory – breaking down doors with axes if necessary – line up and interrogate employees, and seize the factory owner’s financial records. Jack Magid, a tailor, was convicted, fined and imprisoned for the crime of pressing a suit for 35¢ instead of the required 40¢.

In 1933, Time Magazine named Hugh Johnson its “Man of the Year.”

He had to have a gusto,” said the editors of Time. “He had to be a phrasemaker. He had to be handy with the tools of propaganda. He had to have the ruthless drive of a Cromwell and the tact of a Disraeli. In 2000 A.D. there will still be alive hundreds and hundreds of octogenarians to whom the words “chiseler,” “codes,” “crackdown” and “Blue Eagle” will have an historic association. And to them the Man of the Year of 1933 will be National Recovery Administrator Hugh Samuel Johnson.

Trying to run American industry required a huge bureaucracy. Over six thousand statisticians compiled economic data to help the NRA set prices for every industry in the United State. 

Of course, the NRA was modeled after Mussolini’s National Fascist Confederation. Both the Italian and American agencies existed to insure that the economic activity of a free people never interfered with what El Duce or FDR believed to be in the “national interest.”

In 1935, the United States Supreme Court put an end, if only temporarily, to the Mussolini style of governance in America; and it came from an unlikely source – a sick chicken.

The Schechter Poultry Corporation, owned and operated by Joseph, Aaron, and Martin Schechter, sold chickens in the New York City area. The Schechter’s ran afoul of the New Deal’s “Live Poultry Code,” enough to warrant 60 counts in a federal indictment. Not only were they accused of violating NRA minimum wage and maximum hour provisions, they were also accused of selling unfit chickens – hence, the case became known as the “Sick Chicken Case.”

The Schecters were convicted on 18 of the 60 counts in federal court of violations of the 'Live Poultry Code,' and on one count to commit such violations. The convictions were later upheld by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. The Schecter's lawyers eventually petitioned the nation’s high court.

In A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, The Schechter’s argued that since they conducted all their business within New York State and not neighboring states, the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution denied Congress power to strong-arm the family business. The Supreme Court agreed in a 5-4 decision. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said, “We are of the opinion that the attempt through the provisions of the code to fix the hours and wages of employees of defendants in their intrastate business was not a valid exercise of federal power.” He also had a few choice words regarding the sick chicken; “…The same may be said of violations of the code by intrastate transactions consisting of the sale ‘of an unfit chicken’ and of sales which were not in accord with the ordinances of the city of New York.”

Roosevelt was not amused. At a press conference, he said:

The implications of this decision are much more important than any decision probably since the Dred Scott case. The big issue is this: Does this decision mean that the United States government has no control over any national economic problem? We are the only nation that has not solved that problem. We thought we were solving it, and now it has been thrown right in our faces and we have been relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce.

Time Magazine reported, “His speech to the Press was obviously a trial balloon to see whether the U. S. would rally to a constitutional amendment giving the Federal Government centralized powers which it has never had.”

The great “Sick Chicken Case” effectively plucked the Blue Eagle of it regulatory feathers, as well as other New Deal agencies.

After his electoral landslide victory in 1936, the President responded to the Constitutional limits placed on his power by introducing to Congress a court-reform bill that proposed adding one new Supreme Court justice for every current member over the age of 70. This would give Roosevelt six new justices on the high court. “This plan,” said Roosevelt, “will save our national Constitution from hardening of the judicial arteries.” He also claimed, “A lowered mental or physical vigor leads men to avoid an examination of complicated and changed conditions. Little by little, new facts become blurred through old glasses filled, as it were, for the needs of another generation . . .”

Even the most liberal Democrats were appalled by the President’s attempt to amend the Constitution by packing the high court with servile New Dealers. Some members of the usually uncritical press began accusing Roosevelt of having an agenda similar to Hitler’s. Roosevelt’s so called “court-reform” eventually died in the U.S. Senate, prompted, some historians believe, by the retirement of several of the high court’s more conservative members.

With the U.S. entry into the Second World War, the Fascistic similarities between Roosevelt’s early New Deal initiatives and those of Mussolini faded into obscurity, assisted by a new definition of domestic Fascism provided by Vice President Henry A. Wallace.

In a piece written for the New York Times in 1944, Wallace warned the public against the real homegrown Fascist threat facing a post-war America:

The dangerous American Fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American Fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a Fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the Fascist and his group more money and more power.

Wallace further narrowed the focus of his definition of the new American Fascist as one who “will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American Fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.”

Wallace’s New York Times article is pivotal in two important regards: It defined domestic opposition to Soviet aggression and the Roosevelt administration as Hitlerian Fascism, while deflecting criticism of the striking similarities between FDR’s New Deal and the policies of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. In doing so, Mr. Wallace provided the American Left and its allies in the mainstream media a new definition of Fascism that persisted throughout the “long, twilight struggle” of the Cold War.

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, and its many deformed offspring, totalitarian Radical Islam now provides the Left's twisted ideology with a new object of unprincipled sympathy.

Roosevelt’s relentless attacks on the “horse-and-buggy” protections granted by our Creator and enumerated in the Constitution is the ghostly legacy FDR hands down to an unapologetic Democratic Party, which through legislation and judicial “penumbras and emanations,” continue to threaten our battered liberties under the guise of serving “the national interest.”

--Mr. Curmudgeon